By The Sea, Book Four: The Heirs (2 page)

Or what the hell; maybe
he
had. After
all, he was seriously overworked at the office lately. As soon as
he hired another man—although where you could find a process
control specialist in Newport, Rhode Island, was beyond him—as soon
as the pressure let up, he'd be less touchy. And if he did get a
kick out of following an America's Cup campaign through a Newport
summer, damn it, then why should he have to apologize for it?

Still, fond as he was about the event, there
were aspects of an America's Cup summer that he could do without.
It was only July, and already Newport was under siege. Already he
was sick of the tourists, sick of the media, sick of the small
planes and helicopters droning overhead all day. He was even, God
forgive him, sick of the Goodyear blimp. You couldn't go out to
eat; restaurants were booked for days, sometimes weeks ahead. And
none but the grim could possibly reach the waterfront by car
anymore.

Which is why, after the last America's Cup
yacht races three years ago, he'd had to move from his harbor front
office to an industrial park outside of town. Not even the promise
of a close-up look at Ted Turner or a 12-meter yacht had been
enough to entice his savvier clients to fight for parking space.
Besides, the office rent had become outrageous.

It was the forced move from his beloved
harbor, where he'd taught all five daughters to fish and to sail,
that offended him most. Everyone knew that the America's Cup Races
were big business for Newport. Neil Powers was realistic enough to
understand that if you weren't a crew member or a supporter of one
of the America's Cup syndicates—and if you didn't assist, feed,
clothe, write about, or sleep with those who were—then there really
wasn't room for you on the crowded, jumping waterfront during a Cup
summer.

But he was naive—and yes, sentimental—enough
to believe that he deserved a place in the America's Cup rituals:
because his father was Sam Powers, an oak tree of a New Englander
who had crewed fifty years earlier on Harold Vanderbilt's
Rainbow.
That was when the yachts that raced for the
America's Cup were
yachts,
not the stripped-out toys that
competed nowadays. The
Rainbow
was twice as long as today's
12-meter boats and five times heavier, with a spread of sail that
could cover a good-sized gym. The
Rainbow
was a J-boat, and
the Js were
it
in yacht racing—ocean dinosaurs, the likes of
which would never roam the seas again.

Neil stopped and held up his watch in the
darkness, trying to make out the time. He'd been walking briskly
for half an hour, he thought, and he had almost another half hour
until he reached the Finnesterre mansion. By the time he got there
even the fashionably late would have arrived; the show might be
over. He'd convinced himself that Finnesterre was an easy walk from
his modest house on Howard Street. It wasn't. And it was bound to
rain shortly. If he had any brains he'd turn around and go back
home.

But Neil Powers was, and always would be, an
America's Cup junkie. He was on Coggeshall Avenue now, away from
the harbor but close to the ocean, and he was careful to keep out
of the way of the occasional automobile that slithered past on the
unlit road. It was Saturday night, a dangerous night. Drunks were
everywhere—in the bars, in the cars, in the bushes.

So much had changed in the past fifty years.
Everything seemed smaller, more diminished. The boats. Newport.
Even the men. He thought of his father, a powerhouse of a man, so
aptly named: six feet and two hundred thirty pounds of
unadulterated muscle, a giant of a man for a giant of a boat.
Ham-fisted, quick-witted, and totally without pretension, Sam
Powers had worked his ass off belowdecks for Harold Vanderbilt on
the
Rainbow
and had loved every anonymous minute of it.

When Sam saw his young son at all during
that fateful summer of 1934, he filled the boy's head to bursting
with stories of harrowing races against
Yankee,
the other
American J-boat trying out for the right to defend the America's
Cup. "It's nip and tuck, my boy," he would tell young Neil. "Nip
and tuck in every race, and by
God,
it's exciting."

Then he'd grin at Neil and add, "And wildly
foolish, son; I know." (Sam's own boat was a working cargo
schooner, and fancy yacht racing embarrassed him a little.)

How desperately Neil had wanted someday to
sail in an America's Cup contest like his dad. And yet while Cup
fever continued to burn brightly in Neil, the wreck of his father's
beloved schooner
Virginia
seemed to make Sam Powers lose
interest completely in the contests.

At the end, when his father turned more and
more to the bottle, he sometimes confessed to being disillusioned.
But that was when he was in his cups, and Neil had never believed
him.

After his father's death, Neil followed the
1937 races as closely as a stockbroker the Dow-Jones report. And
then after 1937 no more challenges for the Cup came from abroad:
Europe had turned to less trivial pursuits. Not until 1958 did
someone—England again—finally get around to challenging the United
States for the Holy Grail of trophies. By then, personal fortunes
had shrunk and so had the size of the boats.

And so, of course, had Neil's desire to sail
on a Cup defender. He had a bit of a paunch, a college degree, a
wife, two little girls, and a job at an electrical engineering firm
which would frown on the idea of his flouncing off to go a-yachting
all summer.

But still, he had liked to keep his hand in,
and now at fifty-seven, Neil Powers was a nicely mellowed
connoisseur of the sport. Because he was old friends with an
engineer who had worked for the French challenger during the 1977
races, Neil had been slipped a decent number of invitations to
minor events—cocktail parties, brunches, Cup-related exhibits
(posters, watercolors, bronzes), and even an occasional syndicate
party. Balls were much iffier. He and his wife had never quite
managed to get into one. Nancy had died between challenges, but in
1980 he had continued his strolls without her to the great mansions
on Bellevue Avenue whenever there was a ball being held. Like so
many of Newport's servant and middle classes, Neil Powers was a
rubbernecker at heart.

That was why, despite the imminent threat of
serious rain, he was now standing a discreet distance from the
exquisitely lit porte-cochère of the Finnesterre mansion, watching
fantastically jeweled ladies and black-tied gentlemen descending
from their motorized carriages. If he stood there for a million
years, it would not have occurred to him that his youngest,
dearest, most stubborn daughter of all, Quinta Cameron Powers,
would one day rival the undisputed queen of just such a ball.

****

Cindy Seton brought the silver Mercedes to
an abrupt stop and waited impatiently for the top-hatted valet to
open her door. She hated driving big cars, and she particularly
hated arriving at balls unescorted. She deduced that therefore she
hated Alan Seton, since he was responsible for both conditions. The
door to the Mercedes was opened, and Cindy, remembering in time
that her driving foot was bare, slipped into a glove-soft,
high-heeled shoe, scooped up the bottom few yards of her gown of
black Crêpe de Chine, and swept out of the sedan and under the
raised sabers of an honor guard of soldiers in Revolutionary War
uniform.

The Great Hall of Finnesterre was ablaze
with dozens of electrified candelabra whose soft, shimmering light
seemed designed to enhance the almost old-fashioned paleness of
Cindy's heart-shaped face and the subtle blondness of her silky
hair. In a town which virtually insisted on at least a minimum
depth of tan, Cindy turned heads: her paleness, strikingly
beautiful as it was, labeled her as "uninvolved." It was obvious
that she was not spending any time out on the water following the
12-meter yachts during the elimination trials, all who saw her
agreed. Beyond that, opinions as to who she was differed.

The hangers-on guessed that she was a
hanger-on herself, one who lacked the simple decency to bother
making the effort to look as if she belonged. The politicians saw
at a glance that she was wealthy and therefore either was powerful
or had access to someone who was. The yachting community (including
the skippers and their crews, the major syndicate backers, the Race
Committee, the Selection Committee, various yacht club commodores,
and the vast network of worker bees and industrious ants known as
the Syndicate Support Groups) knew very well who she was: Cindy
Seton, wife of Alan Seton, the skipper of
Shadow,
one of
four American yachts hoping to defend the Cup in 1983. Cindy
Seton—a charmer on land; a whiny bitch at sea. Immature. Terminally
bored. Not strong enough, they whispered, to be a Skipper's
Wife.

Not everyone disliked Cindy. There were
those in society whose hearts overflowed for the neglected, unsung
wives of the men who sailed the twelves. Mrs. Cyril Hutley, for
one, liked Cindy very much, and Mrs. Cyril Hutley counted. She was
wife to the heir of a Providence manufacturing dynasty, and perhaps
because she was childless and Cindy was a trust-fund orphan, Mrs.
Hutley had recently taken the young woman up. The imposing,
middle-aged socialite spotted Cindy immediately as she wove her way
uncertainly through the waltzing couples in the Great Hall, and
intercepted her on the edge of the dance area.

"Alone again, poor darling?" Mrs. Hutley
cried, taking Cindy lightly in her arms and kissing her cheek. "He
isn't coming, then?"

"I don't know
what
he's doing," Cindy
moaned. "Apparently it's still complete chaos down on the dock.
Alan said the spare mast was too long or too short or some stupid
thing, so they've got to add something or subtract something, I'm
not sure which. All of the crew are still down at the dock, undoing
things from the broken mast and putting them on the new mast. I'm
sorry," she added, "but I don't think any of them will be coming.
And you've worked so hard." Cindy looked around through glazed
eyes, unseeing. "Everything looks so perfectly lovely."

"Thank you, dear. It's not the America's Cup
Ball, of course," she said deprecatingly, "but it's a lovely
warm-up for the main event, if I do say so." She looked around
contentedly. "We couldn't decide on a motif, so we thought perhaps
just lots of flowers and palms. You know—a tropical look. But still
… it's terribly time-consuming. This is positively my
last
ball."

She squinted appraisingly at Cindy. "Your
gown is marvelous, dear, but I must say you look piqued. Have you
had dinner?"

Cindy's laugh was short and bitter. "Dinner!
As a matter of fact, Alan called me a little while ago. He actually
wanted me to bring a dozen pizzas and a case of beer down to the
dock for the crew and him."

"He didn't!
Tonight?"
Mrs. Hutley
squealed. "What can the man be thinking? Someone should be right
here, right now, from the
Shadow
syndicate. I mean,
really.
There are dignitaries here! Ambassadors, governors,
commodores, from five different countries! And it's not as though
they're from banana republics. These are our
allies,
darling: Australia, France, Canada, Italy, and ... and ..." She
struggled for the name of the fifth foreign challenger.

"Great Britain."

"Of course. England. It goes without saying.
So what does your husband hope to achieve, internationally
speaking, by his undiplomatic behavior?"

"I suppose he hopes to win," Cindy said with
a shrug.

Cindy, even Cindy, was startled by Mrs. Hutley's complete failure
to grasp the exhausting mechanics of a successful defense effort.
First you had to knock out all the other competing Americans; then,
having won the right to defend the Cup, you had to beat the equally
successful foreign challenger. Alan was still trying to whip the
other Americans, and already Cindy had gone through every boutique
in Newport, dined at every restaurant, attended fêtes at every
mansion, driven every mile of coastline, gone to countless teas,
brunches, and cocktail parties—and all without Alan. Life had
become a complete and utter bore.

Reading the obvious chagrin on the young
woman's face, Mrs. Hutley said, "Does Alan have any idea that a Cup
summer should be
fun?"

"Fun? He doesn't know the meaning of the
word," Cindy answered sullenly. "He has this idea that I'll be
closer to the crew if I feed them pizza. I don't know why he just
doesn't have me shine all their shoes and be done with it."

"Poor dear. I do understand
.
After
all,
your
picture isn't going to be splattered on the cover
of every sports magazine in the country. The America's Cup is just
like the Olympics. Who knew what Eric Heiden's wife—if he had a
wife—looked like? Who on earth cared? You just come along with me.
I'm going to find you a crushingly handsome partner for the
evening."

Mrs. Hutley gave the unhappy girl a hug, and
in doing so, upset the tiara that sat precariously on her thin gray
hair. The coronet was a pearl-and-diamond-encrusted token from Mrs.
Hutley's great-grandfather to his wife, presented on the night she
hosted
her
first great ball.

"Oops! Your crown's come undone," Cindy said
with a high-pitched giggle. She could not get herself under control
tonight.

"Be a dear and fix it for me, would you?"
Mrs. Hutley asked.

Cindy, shorter than her patroness, reached
up to fasten the tiara more securely, exposing new expanses of firm
white breast from the slippery confines of her strapless gown.

"Perhaps we should do this some other
place," Mrs. Hutley said in a low voice. "You seem to be attracting
rather fierce attention, Cindy. That ... Continental gentleman
can't seem to keep his eyes off you. Do you know him?" she asked,
inclining her head discreetly toward a forest of Boston ferns
beside the string orchestra.